After Liberty Counsel made the Davis meeting into a national news story, the Vatican was forced to clarify that Davis was one of several people who had been brought to see the pope at the end of his visit and that the pontiff “did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects." The only “real audience” the pope granted, it turned out, was with a former student and his same-sex partner

But Mike Huckabee, who says he spoke with Davis about the meeting at the Values Voter Summit, insisted in an interview with Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson yesterday that Davis and the pope “visited privately, just the two of them, for about 15 minutes” and that it is “elitist” forces in the Vatican who are trying to downplay the pope’s support for Davis’ cause. Outside of that “elitist world,” he said, people realize that Davis’ case could mark “the beginning of the criminalization of Christianity.”

“Now, why the Vatican is trying to downplay this meeting, the only thing I can figure is that many of the very liberal elements, not only of the media, but in some cases of the Catholic Church want to distance themselves because in their elitist world, Kim Davis is an unpopular figure,” Huckabee said. “But I’m telling you, wherever she goes and wherever I see people, in every airport I get on a plane and people say, ‘Thanks for standing up for Kim Davis.’ It’s very different because people realize that this is the beginning of the criminalization of Christianity if we don’t stand up to it.”

Huckabee later suggested that the pope fire the Vatican officials who have tried to downplay his meeting with Davis and paint him as more moderate on social issues: “I’d like to think that at some point the pope might start reading the press clips and maybe fire some of the people who are trying to represent him. I know, as a candidate, if I had press people that were out there misrepresenting my views, they wouldn’t be my press people any longer.”

Paul kicked off the call by discussing the critical issues on the Court’s docket right now: the rights of working people, equal representation through voting, education opportunities through affirmative action, and more. For example, Paul explained that Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association could “severely weaken the ability of workers to form unions” that negotiate salary, benefits, and more. In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Supreme Court could make it very difficult to “maintain healthy diversity at colleges and universities.”

As Paul explained, the mere fact that these and some other cases are on the docket is disturbing. These cases have been “ginned up to topple precedents that conservatives don’t like.” Affirmative action, union fair share fees to prevent free-riding, one person one vote for equality of representation: these are principles that the Court decided decades ago. It used to be that conservatives couldn’t muster up four justices to take on cases like these, but now that Justices Roberts and Alito have joined the Court, we’re seeing more and more cases and decisions that challenge fundamental rights.

Elliot detailed the importance of the ideological makeup of the Court: There have been more than 80 5-4 decisions in the Supreme Court since Roberts and Alito joined the Court. Most of these cases have been extremely harmful to our rights, in areas like money and politics, voting rights, and reproductive freedom. Some, though, have protected important rights, as Justice Kennedy has at times been unwilling to join the conservatives on the Court. For example, he voted with the majority in Obergefell v. Hodges to make marriage equality the law of the land. But as Elliot reminded members, there will be four justices in their 80s by the end of the next president’s first term, and another conservative justice would be devastating for issues that PFAW and members care deeply about, such as abortion rights, worker protections, and religious liberty, just to name a few.

Both conservative and progressive groups know that the next president could very well shift the makeup of the Court and thus the outcomes of key cases. Questions from members focused on what to do to take action on this issue. Elliot and Marge encouraged members to discuss with their friends and colleagues the critical impact the 2016 election will have on how pressing issues will be decided for decades to come. They also discussed with members the possibility of attending town halls for presidential candidates, who will nominate the next Supreme Court justices, as well as Senate candidates, who must confirm the justices, in order to ask questions about the types of justices they will support.

Back in July, after a group called the Center for Medical Progress started to release a series of videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials violating federal laws regarding the donation of fetal tissue for federal research, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte launched an investigation into the claims. The CMP’s claims have not been substantiated — six states have so far closed investigations into Planned Parenthood’s practices without finding any wrongdoing — but that hasn’t deterred Republicans in Congress from going full steam ahead in attacking Planned Parenthood anyway.

The House Judiciary Committee has announced the witnesses for its second hearing on Planned Parenthood (the Oversight Committee also held its own hearing interrogating Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards), and the list makes it pretty clear that Republicans have completely lost interest in the CMP’s original debunked claims and are now just going after Planned Parenthood and legal abortion in general.

While committee Republicans invited to the last hearing two self-professed “abortion survivors,” Levatino, Thayer and Stoltenberg are all representatives of another favorite group within the anti-abortion movement – people who have experienced a “conversion” from being an abortion provider or patient to being an anti-choice activist.

These three activists may have interesting stories, but none is at all relevant to the question that the committee is supposedly investigating. Instead, the choice of these witnesses reveals yet again that House Republicans are using the smear on Planned Parenthood not to launch a genuine investigation, but to attack the very existence of legal abortion.

Rick Wiles returned to “The Jim Bakker Show” today to onceagainwarn about the purported threat of gay marriage, this time telling Bakker that people may die because conservative Christians haven’t stood up and resisted the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality ruling.

Wiles, who hosts the End Times radio program “Trunews,” told Bakker that pastors have been silent in the face of several signs of the Last Days, including “hundreds of thousands of Christian schoolkids going to elementary school, putting their thumb on the scanner to get school lunch.” Bakker agreed, declaring that “it’s going to take a shaking, a vicious, hellish time to wake us up because we are going along with the systems, we are sheep going to the slaughter.”

The failure of conservative Christians to defy and overturn Supreme Court rulings on abortion rights and the separation of church and state, Wiles explained, “is how we got to June 26, 2015, and they changed marriage because they knew the Christians wouldn’t stand up because we gave them decades of being passive.”

Wiles continued: “I’m not advocating violence, but I’m saying, look at Kim Davis in Kentucky. The ruling elite of this country, there are two things that they will crush: They will crush anybody who tries to stop abortion and anybody who speaks against homosexuality, those are the two things they’ll crush. They came down on her, I mean, U.S. federal Marshals took that woman to jail in the United States of America and where’s the outrage?”

Michael Farris, the homeschooling activist and founder of Patrick Henry College, joined South Carolina pastor Kevin Boling on his “Knowing the Truth” radio program yesterday, where he claimed that Christians have entered a new “dark ages” of religious intolerance and “heresy trials” thanks to gay marriage.

Farris claimed, however, that gay rights have brought American Christians back to a time “no better than the era of William and Mary’s Toleration Act” of 1688.

“In the intervening 20 years [since the passage of RFRA], because of increased secularization and especially because of the advance of the homosexual rights movement, particularly in the homosexual marriage arena, that coalition of across-the-board, left-right coalition that gave us the Religious Freedom Restoration Act has completely disintegrated,” he said. “The political left today no longer believes not only in religious freedom, but they don’t believe in freedom of speech, they don’t believe in freedom of association. They want to crush people that dissent.”

“And so we’ve really gone frankly to … no better than the era of William and Mary’s Toleration Act,” he said, “where if you didn’t differ too much from the Church of England, you could get away with some stuff but not too much. So that’s really the era that we’re living in.”

“We’re back to that,” he later added. “If ... Christian people differ on same-sex marriage there are what amount to heresy prosecutions. And so we have gone full circle, we’ve gone away from liberty and gone toward toleration, and with toleration comes persecution and heresy trials and we’re back to the dark ages before liberty in the United States. It’s very distressing.”

Later in the interview, Farris blasted the Obama administration for denying asylum to a family of German homeschoolers he was representing when “they’re willing to have the Muslims come here from Syria, they’re willing to have homosexuals who were persecuted in other countries come here.” (The German family was eventually allowed to stay in the country indefinitely.)

This led Farris to bring up contentions that President Obama is secretly a Muslim, which, he said, he wasn’t sure about either way.

“I don’t really know what his personal faith is, one way or the other, and it really almost doesn’t matter in this sense,” he said. “What I can see and what I can tell, and I’m not judging his heart, is that his political actions give favoritism to Muslims and his political actions punish Christians on a systematic basis, so that bias is very obvious.”

“We are at war on a religious freedom basis,” he added, “and the question is, are Christians going to stand up or are we just going to roll over on this one.”

Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, took issue with President Obama’s comment last week that the U.S. is “the only advanced country on Earth” that sees such a frequency of mass shootings, including the recent shooting that killed ten people in Oregon.

Pratt told Florida talk radio host Joyce Kaufman yesterday that Europe, where some countries have stricter gun laws than the U.S., is actually “the most bloody place in the world” because of the wars that took place there in the 20th century.

“What he’s not, and apparently very few people have really taken into consideration, is that Europe has been in the last 50, 60 years the most bloody place in the world, perhaps with the exception of Communist China and maybe Soviet Russia,” Pratt said. “But tens of millions of people have been killed in wars and in concentration camps and if you throw Soviet Union … into Europe, then we really are talking about Europe being just about on the top of the bloody list. And we’re supposed to pretend as if none of these things every happened.”

Pratt seemed to suggest that the U.S. has avoided such wars because of rampant gun ownership, saying, “Another aspect of this to consider is that we have not have rogue governments do what rogue governments did in Europe.”

But, he said, it is “not for want of trying” that the U.S. government hasn’t gone rogue, citing the 1946 Battle of Athens and the armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada.

With parts of North and South the Carolina experiencing devastating floods, former Rep. Michele Bachmann is weighing in by suggesting that the flooding is a sign of God’s wrath for President Obama’s foreign policy. “US turns its back on Israel, disasters following,” she wrote on Twitter:

This isn’t the first time the Tea Party icon has blamed natural disasters on President Obama’s foreign policy.

Back in April, Bachmann said, “If we actually turn our back on Israel, as we are seeing Barack Obama do today, if that happens then I think we will see a scale and a level of pushback in the United States, negative consequences. I don’t know what they are, but I believe that the Bible is true and I believe that what the Bible says is that our nation and the people of our nation will reap a whirlwind. We could see economic disasters, natural disasters. The United States does not want to be in that position and unfortunately the people put into office Barack Obama, not only once but twice, and the people have to rise up against his actions and demand their leaders take steps accordingly.”

Last week, Donald Trump said that he would “absolutely” bring his GOP rival Ben Carson on as part of his presidential administration if he were to win the 2016 election. Yesterday, Carson returned the compliment, telling Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg that he thought Trump “could bring some wisdom” to a Carson administration.

“I think Donald Trump is a very talented individual,” Carson said. “He certainly knows how to take advantage of situations, there’s no question about that, and I believe he could bring some wisdom somewhere along the line. I think there would be room for him somewhere.”

Carson wasn’t clear on what role Trump would fill with his wisdom, but suggested that perhaps the billionaire could act as a presidential adviser.

On Thursday, Americans braced ourselves as reports trickled in about yet another mass shooting, this one at a community college in Oregon, leaving 10 people dead.

It was a horrific scene that we’d seen too many times before. But Jeb Bush was taking it in stride, and told an interviewer on Friday that although the shooting was “very sad,” it didn’t require government action.

“Look,” he said, “stuff happens, there’s always a crisis, and the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”

Remember the good ole days of the Bush administration when right after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as Bagdad was collapsing into chaos, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went before the press to inform us that “stuff happens”?

“Stuff happens,” he declared, “and it’s untidy and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen.”

More stuff happened throughout the Bush years. Remember the Katrina stuff? And yesterday it was reported that the Jeb! team is considering bringing George W. Bush out on the trail so he can bolster his sagging poll numbers and the entire country can relive the dream!

Regarding this most recent use of “stuff happens,” it perfectly encapsulates the attitude about gun violence that is now prevalent in the Republican Party, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the NRA and its fellow gun groups. The fact that this “stuff” happens more in America than anywhere else in the developed world doesn’t seem to change their mind that mass shootings are an inevitable act of nature.

But it also encapsulates a disturbing view of the role of government in solving national problems. Bush wasn’t saying just that our representatives in the government shouldn’t act when “stuff happens.” He was also saying that we should just let the stuff keep happening. Stop me if you’ve heard about this presidency before.

Inching Forward is Not Enough: The GOP Must End its Relentless Obstruction of Judicial Nominees

WASHINGTON – Today Judge Dale Drozd was confirmed by the Senate to serve as a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of California. Drozd was voted out of committee with overwhelming bipartisan support four months ago, but only today did the Senate GOP leadership end their needless obstruction of his confirmation. He was only the seventh judge confirmed this year, an inexcusably small number.

People For the American Way Executive Vice President Marge Baker released the following statement:

We congratulate Judge Drozd, a highly qualified nominee, on his long overdue confirmation today. But inching forward on the critical task of judicial confirmations is not enough. That a vacant seat classified as a judicial emergency sat open for so long while Republican leadership dragged their feet is an insult to all the Americans waiting for their day in court.

Despite a judicial vacancy crisis and a plethora of highly qualified nominees, the Republican led-Senate has scheduled votes on a total of seven judges this Congress. This is the slowest rate of judicial confirmations since the 1950s, when there were far fewer vacancies to fill. The GOP needs to stop putting politics above the basic functioning of our judicial system.

People For the American Way has a new edit memo detailing the latest information on judicial nominations, including:

Comparisons between today’s rate of judicial confirmations and the rate during the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency, when Democrats controlled the Senate.

Comparisons between today’s number of judicial vacancies and judicial emergencies and those during Bush’s last two years.

Information on some of the many examples of how Republicans are blocking confirmation votes on qualified nominees.

PFAW Executive Vice President Marge Baker and PFAW Senior Legislative Counsel Paul Gordon are available to speak with the press. To arrange an interview, please contact Layne Amerikaner at media@pfaw.org.

Right-wing radio host Michael Savage suggested last week that the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon was a plot by President Obama to distract the public from the Syrian Civil War.

Savage also claimed that the community college shooter was almost certainly a Muslim, possibly tied to Al Qaeda and ISIS, but that the media would refuse to report such facts. He cited the fact that one of the Americans who thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a train in France hailed from the town in Oregon where the shooting took place as evidence that the shooter was likely a radical Islamist seeking revenge.

Of course, the deceased shooter was not a Muslim and actually identified as “not religious but spiritual” on his Spiritual Passions dating account, and seemed to have interest in the occult and white supremacy.

CNN reported that the shooter left writings which indicate that he “studied past mass shootings and identified with the perpetrators of those rampages. The shooter also expressed frustration at not having a girlfriend and being a virgin, the law enforcement officials say.”

WorldNetDaily columnist Carl Jackson knows who is really to blame for the Umpqua Community College shooting: Liberals.

As Jackson put it, liberals who back the separation of church and state should be held responsible for the shooting because they prevented schools from teaching students how to pray to God:

It didn’t take long for President Obama to blame the object – a gun – used by the murderer of the Umpqua Community College massacre in Roseburg, Oregon, rather than the murderer himself. Nor did he mention the fact that the victims were shot execution style in the head as they confessed their Christian faith to the murderer one at a time, when asked at gunpoint. If leftists were as adamant about keeping God in schools, as they are about keeping guns off school campuses, I believe we’d have fewer mass shootings.

Without the God of the Bible, morals are relative. The victims of the murderer, which happened to be Christian, valued life. The murderer, obviously, did not. We can continue to pretend, and get nowhere, that pieces of metal are responsible when acts of evil like this occur, or we can choose to address the real issue: the lack of eternal consequences taught to our kids today. If a person grows up believing he’ll be punished in this life, and the one to come, by committing such a heinous crime, do you think he’d be more or less likely to murder someone? This is such an important and obvious question. Unfortunately, the left refuses to ask it. As a result, we have a generation of kids that don’t understand cause and effect. If God isn’t talked about in our schools, why should we act surprised when students act like it?

Leftists want to blame guns and extremists whenever these atrocities repeat themselves. However, it is unchecked evil that’s to blame – evil often brought on by the left’s pursuit of a completely secular America. The truth is, if the left valued life as they claim, they’d place more gun-toting, Black Lives Matter hated cops on campuses to protect our kids from harm. Perhaps they’d even consider abiding by the Second Amendment and allow the good guys to conceal their guns. You don’t stop evil by banning guns! You stop evil by killing evil people! The left can’t understand this. Without God as a source of objective truth, how could they?

But Jackson’s rant about how church-state separation contributes to school shootings pales in comparison to that of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, who said that feminists should be held responsible for suppressing men’s need “to shoot things.”

Masculinity isn’t fragile, as a spiteful, sociopathic feminist Twitter hashtag recently claimed. But — and here’s where some man-hating feminists almost get it right — it is powerful, and exciting, and it does have a flip-side if not properly respected. At its best, male competitiveness is the driving force behind most of society’s progress. We would be nowhere without the patriarchy, from the internet and space travel to the road under your feet and the roof on your house. The same thing that drives mass shooters inspires courage, too.

That doesn’t mean masculinity is “toxic.” What’s toxic is society’s attitudes towards men. Masculinity only becomes “toxic” when it is beaten down and suppressed and when men are told that what and who they are is defective. It becomes toxic when young boys are drugged in school because they don’t conform to feminine standards of behaviour.

What’s worse is that the media ridicules, criticises, punishes and demonises masculinity, then uses the product of its own hatred to justify more man-hating, in a Kafkaesque cycle of progressive insanity that has only one, inevitable consequence: more innocent dead people.

Progressives don’t see the irony in going after “straight white men.” But they are hypocritical bigots, hounding people for gender, skin colour and sexuality and saying that essential male characteristics are wrong. Men must be allowed to compete. To fight. To shoot things. Today’s man-punishing, feminised culture is creating killers by suppressing these urges. We have to stop it.

The confusion and alienation that so many young men feel today drives some to drop out of society completely and to retreat into pornography and video games. But others — the less stable, less supported, less able to cope with their natures — become progressively more angry until they explode in rage and pain.

Last week, I, a progressive, attended Values Voter Summit. I was there to soak up the conservative vibes and better understand the far-right. I expected to leave with nothing more than a disconcerted feeling, having listened to people disparage gay and transgender people and degrade women’s health for two days. Instead, I left with what every college student wants most: a $25 Chipotle gift card.

Here’s what happened. It was Saturday and I was at the first breakout session of the afternoon, “The Silencing of Free Speech for Christians in the Media and in Education.” The session was a panel on Christian persecution, which according to panelists Dave Garrison of Ohio Christian University, Kate Obenshain of Fox News, and Kelly Shackelford of Liberty Institute, is sweeping the nation through things like gay rights and reproductive freedom.

Obenshain opened the session by calling for any students in the audience (whom she probably assumed were all from Liberty University, since the event was heavily attended by LU students) who knew the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. If anyone wanted to come to the front of the room and recite it, she said, they would be rewarded with a $25 gift card to Chipotle. Her challenge was met with silence. The group of LU students sitting at the front of the room apparently either did not know the Preamble to the Constitution that every speaker at the Summit had invoked, or were too nervous to stand in front of the crowd.

Obenshain asked again, and when she was met with silence again she said she would open the floor to any adults in the room.

It was at that moment that I thought, “Hey, I’m a student… I’ve known the Preamble since 7th grade… I like Chipotle…” and raised my hand. I was called to the front of the room and handed a microphone. Pausing after each clause (because I had memorized the Preamble by watching Schoolhouse Rock and needed to sing it in my head), I recited the Preamble. The crowd applauded, Shackelford shook my hand, and I was handed my reward. I hurried back to my seat, met on my way back with high fives from older men in the audience.

Not to sound ungrateful for free food, but I’ve often considered that, if I could do that day again, I might do a few things differently. In a perfect world, I would have identified myself, and let it sink in that the person in the room who knew the Constitution was a progressive college student there for an internship with a progressive organization.

All in all, at least after a weekend of homophobia, transphobia, and thinly veiled racism and misogyny, I got a good story… and four free burritos.

Michael Savage has been cheering on Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria, which has mostly targeted anti-regime rebels rather than ISIS forces, insisting that Russian involvement in the country’s civil war has terrified President Obama, whom Savage has accused of supporting ISIS.

After asking his listeners last week if they back Russian airstrikes in Syria, Savage implied that the shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon was an act arranged to distract the American public from the conflict in Syria.

“By the way, at the same time, right on schedule, ‘Sorry I can’t notice it, there is a shooting at an Oregon community college, 10 dead, right on schedule!” Savage shouted. “I’m sorry, I’m not generally given to conspiracy theories, but it seems to be a very convenient way to get Obama’s abject disastrous failures as a foreign policy moron off the headlines. Now we’re all focused on the deaths at a community college. I didn’t say that it was orchestrated by the government, but I’m starting to wonder: How do these things happen so conveniently for a failure like this? Where is Obama? What fundraiser is he at? Where is he hiding?”

After the Southern Poverty Law Center, followed by Media Matters and Right Wing Watch, pointed out that Gaffney had lavished praise on a white nationalist activist, Gaffney wrote that he had simply wanted to discuss “a recent article” by Taylor and was “unfamiliar with Mr. Taylor’s views on other matters and did not discuss or endorse them.” He said that if he had known Taylor’s full history, he would not have invited him on the program, and then pulled the interview with Taylor from his website.

Now Taylor is fighting back, writing an open letter to Gaffney accusing him of caving to “lefty” organizations when “there has been no criticism of you from any conservative source.” He reminds Gaffney that “you were aware of some of my views, and found them insightful.”

Taylor notes that the article that Gaffney “admired” was very clear about his “basic views on race.” Indeed, Taylor’s article, “Is This the Death of Europe?,” begins with a quote from “The Camp of Saints,” a book that the SPLC notes “is revered by American white supremacists”; in the first paragraph, he warns that “a million wretched, brown-skinned people” wanting to “feed on the wealthy white West” will eventually ensure that “Europe is snuffed out”; and so on from there.

From Taylor’s open letter to Gaffney:

Mr. Gaffney, these people are not your friends. They hate you. They want to silence you and drive you out of respectable society. Why do you let them decide whom you may invite on your program? Why do you let them set the bounds of legitimate discussion? This is the great and perhaps fatal weakness of “conservatives”–to have conceded some strange moral power to people who hate them.

The statement on your website says you weren’t aware of all of my views when you invited me on your program, and that you now find you disagree with some of them. I believe you. But you were aware of some of my views, and found them insightful. I’m sure you don’t insist on complete agreement with all your guests. Why does disagreeing with me on some matters make me a pariah? Because the SPLC says so?

Removing our interview from your website does not mean it never happened. We will be posting a transcript shortly. What is much more dismaying is what removing the interview says about you. If you wanted to make a record of our disagreements, the manly thing would be to invite me back on your program and explain to me why I am wrong.

To your credit, you did call me personally to tell me that you were taking down the interview. I salute you for that. But your reasons made no sense. You said you were opposed to all forms for supremacy: white, black, or Hispanic. I tried to explain that wanting to live in a majority-white society is no more “supremacist” than Japanese wanting to live in a majority-Japanese society or Israelis wanting to live in a majority-Jewish society. In fact, my basic views on race should have been clear in the article “ Is This the Death of Europe?” that you admired.

It is a great pity that your name and mine have been linked in yet another success by people who despise you–and me–to stamp out the public exchange of views they don’t like. You care deeply about the preservation of certain values; so do I. But we must never trim our sails for fear of what our detractors might say. We will never succeed if we let our enemies set the boundaries of how we should act.

During televangelist Jim Bakker’s September “Prophetic Conference,” pastor Chuck Missler said that there is little to no hope that America can avoid God’s judgment, insisting that the U.S. is already experiencing divine wrath. “It’s going to get darker and darker and darker,” he said.

Missler lamented that hate crime laws have supposedly criminalized the freedom of speech while members of the media are somehow not in jail for treason: “We have a media that is the lapdog of the government. The purpose of the media in a democracy is to inform the electorate; we have a media that takes pride in shaping opinions rather than informing them and that should be a crime and they should be tried for treason in effect because that’s their job.”

Increasing acceptance of homosexuality, Missler said, is a sign that “there is a judgment of God prevailing and it’s going to increase,” in addition to the fact that “the people who are trying to destroy America have taken over.”

Later in the interview, Carson cited a fake Thomas Jefferson quote to claim that gun regulations don’t work:

The people who want to get rid of our gun rights, I want them to tell me how exactly that stops these kinds of incidents from happening. Because the people who are going to commit these crimes, they don’t care about your silly rules, they’re not going to pay attention to them. So all you’re going to do is create more vulnerability, as Thomas Jefferson said. He said the people who are going to be disadvantaged are the ones who are law-abiding.

During one of his September shows, Bakker pointed to another signal that something terrible would occur that month: God had told him to dress all in black, right down to his underwear.

“I went to get dressed and I pray about what I wear, I really do, I know I look stupid sometimes, but the last time God told me to wear a color was red, and what happened that day? The stock market crashed,” Bakker said. “Today, God said, ‘I want you to wear all black.’ Even my shoes are black. My underwear is black. My socks are black.”

When Bakker’s wife and co-host, Lori, complained such details were “TMI,” Bakker disagreed: “No, it is not too much information because when God says, ‘Get the sin out,’ He meant, ‘Get the sin out.’ When you take over your enemy, you are to destroy every part of the enemy. I am in mourning because people aren’t ready.”

In his interview with Perkins, Cahn pointed to Hurricane Joaquin as a sign of God’s wrath for America’s legalization of gay marriage, legal abortion and the United Nation’s treatment of Israel, suggesting that the hurricane would strike Washington, D.C., because that’s “where the leadership is.”

However, he was careful to hedge his bets, saying that his point stands “whatever happens, whether it peters out or not.”

He said that the name Joaquin is based on the name of the evil king Jehoiakim, and could be a sign that God knows that American leaders have “crossed a gigantic line” and “overruled the word of God massively” when they “legalized the killing of the unborn in 1973 and now we have the striking down of marriage.” Cahn said that the White House’s decision to celebrate LGBT pride month with rainbow lights was another “act of desecration” that will “provoke judgment.”

Perkins agreed, saying that while “those on the left like to mock these things,” American leaders throughout history have viewed hurricanes as signs that “God is trying to send us a message.”

Ann Corcoran, the head of Refugee Resettlement Watch and the leading voice against efforts to settle refugees in the United States, warned last month that President Obama is using Syrian refugees as part of his plot to “diversify every town in America” as he goes about “changing America by changing the people, literally.”

Corcoran, who has previously warned that refugee resettlement is being used to “rub diversity in the noses of conservative communities” and push “the whole multicultural meme,” told the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney on his “Secure Freedom Radio” program, “There’s going to be a demographic examination of your town to see how diverse you are, and you will be rewarded if you’re sufficiently diverse and you will be not rewarded with government grants and so on and so forth if you’re insufficient in the diversity area. It is really, he is changing America by changing the people, literally.”

Gaffney shared Corcoran’s concerns, saying that Obama “was about the fundamental transformation of America, and a key element of that strategy, it certainly seems, through the refugee resettlement and other techniques … has been to change the population, change the demographics of our society.”

Gaffney then asked Corcoran to respond to “a working hypothesis of mine” that refugees are being resettled in places where the Obama administration wants to change the political “representation.”

Corcoran agreed that “it seems to me that they’re targeting districts that have been traditionally red districts or red states,” like Texas and her “very conservative, very insular community” in Maryland that “would have been the last place on earth you would think would be the best place to bring a bunch of third-world refugees.”